Make changes in Bronx before someone dies
EVERY time we see a fresh version of the same terrifying picture, we hear the same thing from relieved broadcasters, fans, ballplayers. Every time a baseball leaves a bat — screaming at 100 miles an hour — and invades the seats where spectators are swilling sodas, scarfing nachos or texting friends, we hear the same:
“On e of these days, someone is going to get killed.” Well, here’s the thing: someone already got killed. His name wa s Alan Fish, he was 14 years old, and on the night of May 16, 1970, he was sitting behind the visitor’s dugout at Dodger Stadium. In the bottom of the third inning, San Francisco’s Gaylord Perry threw a pitch that the Dodgers’ Manny Mota, batting right-handed, ripped foul. It reached the second row.
And collided flush with Alan Fish’s temple. Four days later he died.
Forty-seven years have passed since Alan Fish became the only spectator in the history of professional baseball — stretching back to 1869 — to die after being struck by a foul ball, a number that is only so low through sheer luck and providence.
Forty-seven years, and every time a line drive crashes into a crowd, there is the same momentary panic until someone raises an arm in triumph, the ball clutched in a hand or a mitt, until the ball ricochets harmlessly away. Except sometimes, there is no harmless ricochet.
Sometimes the ball hits a toddler in the face.
And that’s when you realize that baseball has to be hit in the face with a cold bucket of common sense. The time to extend the netting that protects fans probably arrived 47 years ago. But it has most certainly arrived now. Baseball has urged this. A New York City councilman named Rafael Espinal has all but threatened to introduce a bill mandating netting from foul pole to foul pole in the city’s two ballparks.
The Mets extended the netting at Citi Field over the All-Star break.
The Yankees have to spend the next four days doing the same thing at Yankee Stadium, need to have it in place by the time they play the Royals in The Bronx on Monday afternoon. It’s long past time. Common sense has to carry the day now, because it’s true: One of these days, someone is going to get killed.
The Yankees can count themselves lucky that Wednesday wasn’t that day, that the young girl who was carried from the lower stands and taken to the hospital wasn’t instead taken to a morgue. “All parks should have [netting],” CC Sabathia said. “All the way down.”
“We need i t ,” Aaron Judge said, and if there’s any player in baseball who should be an advocate for this, it’s Judge. He hits balls that fly like cannonballs off his bat, and when those 110-mph blasts land in distant bleachers it’s like celebrating the Strong Man in the circus.
But Judge also has stood frozen in terror in the batter’s box watching some of those missiles hook or slice foul. He hit a kid in July. Wednesday, it was Todd Frazier who stood at the plate in horror in the f ifth inning, tracing the line drive from his bat, through the air, right to the girl’s face.
“I thought of my kids,” Frazier admitted. Blake is 3. Kimberly turns 2 in December. Of course he saw their faces. Matt Holliday was captured on TV wiping away tears as he stood near second base during the delay. Holliday preferred not to speak about it afterward, but you can believe he was thinking of his four kids, too, aged 4 to 13.
The NHL learned its lesson too late. On March 16, 2002, a 16-year-old girl named Brittanie Cecil was struck by a stray puck while watching the Columbus Blue Jackets at Nationwide Arena. After she died, the league mandated netting installed at either end of every arena.
She remains the only hockey fan in the league’s history to die as a result of being hit by a puck. Because of the league’s quick action, it is likely she will be the last. Forty-seven years after Alan Fish’s death, baseball is still easing its way into the idea of extended netting, mostly because there are deep-pocketed fans who pay top dollar for unimpeded views.
Well, tough. If you heard the awful silence that invaded Yankee Stadium on Wednesday, you know there is only one thing to do in the name of both common sense and common decency. Extend the netting. Make the fans safe.
Now. Right bloody now.